Eilert Ekwall

Bror Oscar Eilert Ekwall (born 8 January 1877 in Vallsjö, Jönköpings län, Sweden, died 23 November 1964 in Lund), known as Eilert Ekwall, was Professor of English at Lund University, Sweden, from 1909 to 1942, and one of the outstanding scholars of the English language of the first half of the 20th century. He wrote works on the history of the language, but is best known as the author of numerous important books on English place-names (in the broadest sense) and personal names.

His chief works in this area are The Place-Names of Lancashire (1922), English Place-Names in -ing (1923, new edition 1961), English River Names (1928), Studies on English Place- and Personal Names (1931), Studies on English Place-Names (1936), Street-Names of the City of London (1954), Studies on the Population of Medieval London (1956), and the monumental Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (1936, new editions 1940, 1947/51 and the last in 1960). The Dictionary remained the standard national reference resource for over 40 years, and is still valuable even though some aspects of Ekwall's methodology and some of his ideas are no longer accepted. Although not a county editor of the survey conducted by the English Place-Name Society (1923-date), his philological advice was often sought and acknowledged by scholars preparing the county volumes, such as Allen Mawer and Frank Stenton. He was competent not only in English philology, but also in Scandinavian and Celtic, making him ideally qualified as an authority on linguistic aspects of the place-names of England.

His other work on English included scholarly editions of classic early-modern works such as John Jones' Practical Phonography of 1701 (1907), the anonymous Writing Scholar's Companion of 1695 (1911), John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes (1930). Notable other book(let)s were that on modern English phonology and morphology originally published in German in 1914 and still being reprinted in 1965 (English edition finally after Ekwall's death, in 1975); and that on the genitive of groups, with much relevance for place-name studies (1943).

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